


To Be Normal

by kenzieann27



Series: Short Story Stuff [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-22 19:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19973119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenzieann27/pseuds/kenzieann27
Summary: The first day of high school brings many feelings, especially to a precocious young man who finds himself sitting across a lunch table from an eccentric blind student.Hey! This short story won second place in my college's annual writing contest.





	To Be Normal

When someone asks what your favorite class at school is, the natural response would be an academic class: math, English, science, history, even art would come to mind. However, the response of “Lunch” is usually followed by laughter as if the response was meant as a joke. Lunch is a class in school, though not an academic class, but rather a social one. You are tested every day when you walk into the cafeteria to sit down amongst hundreds of your classmates. Like academic classes, lunch is exhausting; to many people, social interaction for such a long period of time is just as tiring as hearing a lecture for an hour.

I thought about this as I walked around the cafeteria at South Oran High School, searching for a seat. The room was exploding with voices, all too amalgamated to distinguish to individual conversations. At once, though, it was obvious the types of groups that settled into the seats at the tables: the athletes shouting expletives here, the seniors taking selfies there. Towards the back corner of the cafeteria, I was finally able to find a seat at a near-empty table, where only one other kid was seated. Taking the opportunity, I rushed towards it and sat down my lunchbox as I swung my legs over the bench. The boy at the table was very odd-looking, most likely the reason behind his isolation. His dark hair was pushed into some sort of unkempt quiff, a splatter of freckles ran across his face, blue paint smeared on his cheek above a large bruise. However, I didn’t engage with this presented social test and began to eat my lunch without speaking up. Not that my standards were too high to talk to the lanky teenager, but because I was not that well-versed in the ways of lunchtime chitchat. However, the boy across from me looked up in my direction, where I could see the reflection of a boy with curly hair and brown eyes hidden behind his own pair of glasses.

“Took you long enough to find a seat, Jude. Morgan said she’d kill you if you didn’t sit by me at lunch.”

I looked around but saw no one else reply. The boy continued to look towards me, and I shifted in my seat before realizing he was speaking to me.

“My name’s not Jude.”

He seemed somewhat startled by my answer, as well as a bit embarrassed. He smiled as he pointed to his glasses.

“Sorry. I can’t really see that well... or at all for that matter. I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on that earlier.”

His teeth were moderately crooked, but he also had one of those smiles that overshadowed the physical quality of his teeth. It was warm and inviting, certainly genuine with a hint of innocence.

“I try not to question a lot of things here.”

“You don’t have to be so fucking dramatic, dude. This is high school, not a prison.”

I chuckled at the ironic statement. High school, for me, certainly felt like prison. We weren’t allowed outside, we sat in locked rooms all day, and we had strict times for meals. I continued to piece at my turkey sandwich as I glared at the strange person in front of me.

“So, what’s your name? You’re the first kid to talk to me all day.”

“Leonard Perkins.”

“Yeah, I’m not calling you that. How about Lenny? Lencer? Lenaissance Festival?”

“Everyone calls me Lenny.”

“Lenny, Vinny. Vinny, Lenny. I’m Vincent.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“And don’t go around telling people your whole name, you sound like a jackass.”

“Okay.”

“I know you are dying to ask the question, so you can just ask it.”

I crumpled up the plastic bag that my sandwich was in and tossed it back into my lunchbox. I opened my can of lukewarm soda and took a small sip before pondering Vincent’s implication.

“What question?”

“The question everyone asks, moron. ‘What’s it like to be blind?’”

“I guess I kinda know the answer to that. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was like six.”

“Everyone thinks that it’s just a pitch-black nightmare. ‘It must be terrible!’ I wouldn’t even know that I can’t see if people just stopped asking me about it.”

I nodded, watching him poke at his half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. I barely noticed as an older student walked up and plopped next to Vincent, slapping him on the back.

“I see you made a friend on your first day. Mom is going to be so proud of you!”

Despite not being able to see much past his darkened glasses, I could tell that Vincent was rolling his eyes as he turns toward the new face at the table.

“She’s going to be even prouder when I tell her you were making out with Kimmy Zhou in the hallway.”

“And how would you even know that?” The older teenager looked towards me with an expression on his face that seemed to scream _can you believe this guy?_ “Like she’d trust anything you told her. You once said that you legally changed your name to Dipshit.”

“Or maybe she would like to know that you let me walk straight into the flagpole this morning,” Vincent smirked as he poked his finger at the bruise on his face.

Rolling his eyes as he changed the subject, the older figure reached his hand out towards me, which I shook as he introduced himself.

“Jude Bodenstein. Vincent’s my brother, by the way. I’m not just harassing the blind kid on his first day of high school.”

“This is Lenny. Don’t talk to him too much, you’ll scare him away.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like you that much, Dipshit.”

I continued to drink my soda, listening to the brothers’ bickering. As I pulled my orange from my lunchbox, Jude looked up towards me, catching my attention. I turned around and noticed the crowd of kids sitting at the table behind me; Jude waved at the crowd, excusing himself before leaving the table. I turned around to see Vincent solemnly eating his sandwich as I could feel the table moving due to him bouncing his leg underneath it.

“Where did your brother go?”

“Probably to sit with his friends. He’s a senior, so today’s the whole ‘last first-day’ thing. I’m pretty sure I heard a girl crying about it earlier.”

“Now _that’s_ dramatic.”

Vincent chuckled as he leaned over, grabbing at his backpack under the table. He reappeared with a blue rectangular object wrapped in a pair of headphones.

“What is that?”

“You’ve never seen a Walkman before? To be fair, I haven’t either. I got it for my birthday, it was my dad’s when he was a kid. Cassettes are way cooler than CDs, I like the little rattling sound they make,” he reached back down into his backpack and pulled out a small, colorful box and shook it, “you know?”

I nodded along as he rambled on about his music, naming bands I’ve never heard of. I stared at the tape on the table before picking it up and noticing the name of the band.

“You like classical music?”

Vincent scrunched up his nose as he scoffed, “That shit puts me to sleep.”

“But this one,” I handed the tape to him, “is classical music, yeah?”

I watched as he opened the case and placed the tape inside the Walkman, setting down the device’s previous tape on the table. He slid the headphones over his ears, and after a few seconds, he fumbled for the stop button, placing a hand over his mouth as he erupted into laughter.

“What’s so funny?

“You think that this,” he picked up the empty case and tossed it at me, “is classical music. That’s what’s so funny, dude.”

I set the case back on the table, feeling myself becoming flushed from the embarrassment. “It said orchestra, so I just assumed it was classical.”

Vincent continued to laugh as he pulled off the headphones, holding them out for me to take. I set down my can of soda and took them, pulling them down over my ears. He pressed down the play button, still laughing at my ignorance. After listening to the song for a few seconds, I handed the headphones back to him; as he pressed the stop button, he simply just stared at me.

“So, would you still say that ELO is classical music?”

“I don’t really listen to a lot of music, I guess. Definitely not bands like,” I pick up the other tape on the table, scanning the words printed on it, “New Order? Or whatever that falsely-advertised orchestral band is all about.”

I watched as Vincent replaced the old tape in his Walkman, putting the ELO tape in its case and tossing it into his backpack. After wrapping the Walkman back up in its headphones, he stuck out his middle finger and waved it in front of my face.

“And that’s for disrespecting Jeff Lynne. That man is a legend and he didn’t form the greatest band in history for some jackass- you’re a freshman, I take it- some jackass freshman to call it a falsely-advertised orchestra.”

We sat in our own complacent silence for what seemed like forever. I found myself tapping my toes in my shoes to the melody of the song I had listened to for only a few seconds as I struggled to peel my orange.

“So, are you a freshman, too? Your brother said it’s your first day of high school.”

“I’m a sophomore. Today’s my first day of real school, I was homeschooled before.”

“I would hate to be homeschooled. I’m already home by myself all the time, my mom works two jobs so she’s barely home when I’m awake."

“We should switch lives, dude. I would kill for that independence. I can never be by myself, I’m always with someone. It only makes me feel like a freak, sometimes I just want to be left alone. I want to be normal for once, like a normal kid. What’s it like for you?” I simply stared at him, noticing the flash of pink rising to his cheeks from the anger. “What’s it like to be normal?”

I sat there for a minute, unsure of how to answer the question without making Vincent more upset than he already seemed to be. I adjusted my glasses before fabricating a quick response, hoping that the conversation would return to a less awkward one.

“I’m not normal. No one really is, I guess. Everyone pretends to be normal, but we’re all weird in some way. I guess that’s what makes us human.”

Vincent grabbed around at the table and picked up a slice of my orange, closing his eyes and shaking his head slightly. I watched him chew at the orange slice as he stared blankly around the lunchroom.

“I know it’s a dumb question, but I like asking that. It’s the same thing when people ask me about being blind. It’s hard to know what exactly blindness is because I’ve been this way my whole life. To me, it is just life. Like how you don’t ask a dog what it’s like to be a dog, you know? Cats probably don’t even know they’re cats, and they don’t care. They just _are_ , and that’s okay. But because I’m not weird in the right way, I get hounded for it every goddamn day of my life and that’s just what’s normal for me and it sucks.”

“Well, normal is such a vague term. It’s different for everyone, kind of like with your music. To you, it is normal. You listen to that crap all day, and you’re going to eventually say that it is your normal. Like wearing glasses, for me, it’s normal because I’ve worn them for most of my life.”

“When people ask me what it’s like, I just say that I am not blind. Because I’m not; I just see things differently than everyone else. When I see you, I see this kid that has terrible taste in music. When I see my brother, I see a dork. People are only blind when they’re dead because then they can’t see anything.”

“But it’s not like you can see the way that I look. How can you know someone or judge them if you don’t know something as simple as the color of their hair or the way they move? You don’t even know the color of your own hair, as a matter of fact.”

“And I don’t care because that stuff doesn’t really matter. Sometimes I’m glad I don’t notice that stuff. When I’m friends with someone, they should be happy because I’m not going to be friends with people based on the way they look. I can see whether people are actually good people or not. I mean, it’s not easy being ‘blind’, but it’s a relief knowing that that shit will never matter to me.”

“I never really thought about that before.”

“Not to be rude, but it’s obvious that you haven’t. Because most people never think that way, they are so quick to judge based on looks that it’s as if nothing else matters. If I lived in a place where only blind people lived, I would go my whole life thinking I was a normal person. But because I don’t, I get to understand that there are people that can see things with their eyes and that I’m at the disadvantage in life. It’s not always bad, though. There are people like you who get to see my point of view. It’s also pretty funny when people try and describe things to me, like what even are giraffes? They sound terrifying.”

“You should write a book someday.”

Vincent shrugged, piecing away at my orange. I started to move it closer to him, but he slapped my hand away.

“I guess it just comes down to being grateful for things. If you lived in a world where everyone could see perfectly, you wouldn’t be grateful for the ability to see. I’m pretty sure no one would. You only realize these things when they’re gone, or when someone tells you that you’re not normal.”

“There are schools for the blind though, right? Why didn’t you go to one of those?”

“I feel like there, I would just be learning about how to show the world that I’m different, how to accommodate me. There, I would be learning how to use a cane and how to interact with people and how to find a seeing-eye dog. Here, I get to learn how to be a normal kid. I mean, I know that I will always be different and weird, but hopefully not just because I’m blind.”

“But you’ll have to learn that stuff eventually. You can’t go your whole life just wandering around without any help.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I feel like I’m ready to. For now, I just like being an annoying kid. Makes me feel normal, like these glasses,” Vincent wiped the remnants of my orange off on his shirt before grabbing his Clubmaster sunglasses off his face by the left lens; like the headphones, he held them out for me to take. “I know they make me stand out, but they make me feel cool. For all I know, I could look like an idiot. I’m supposed to wear them because of the light, ‘cause when I put these bad boys on, the lights don’t shine no more. That’s a line from the song, I’m not some eloquent philosopher or some shit.”

Taking off my own glasses and setting them on the table, I slid the dirt-covered, smudged sunglasses on my face. Despite not being able to physically see much other than muted-color blobs, I saw what Vincent meant: it didn’t matter what I looked like, I couldn’t see myself anyway. What mattered was how I felt, and I felt stupid. I took off the glasses and turned around, noticing that my glasses were missing from the table.

“Hey, Perkins, I hate to break it to you,” Vincent was wearing my glasses, his small fingerprints plastered across my lenses. “I think you’re blind, ‘cause I can’t see shit out of these.”

I laughed at his attempt at a lighthearted joke, somewhat distracted at the sight of Vincent’s filthy glasses on the table, half-needing to pick them up and wipe them off with a napkin. As I reached to pick them up, Vincent dangled my glasses in front of my face; abandoning my previous desire, I took back my glasses and wiped the fingerprints off on my shirt. When I regained my usual eyesight, I looked at Vincent while he scratched at his eyebrow. He had dark circles underneath his eyes (though anything seemed dark on his pale skin), which were a dark color as well: brown.

Vincent picked up his sunglasses and set them on top of his head, keeping them there as he finished his proudly self-made lunch; I later realized that the “Vincent Special” consisted of the same items every day: a peanut butter sandwich, a juice box, and a pouch of applesauce (on holidays, he threw in a few pieces of fruit-flavored candy).

“You do realize you put way too much peanut butter on your sandwich, right? I’m surprised you’re even able to open your mouth after eating all of that.”

“Oh dude, I could just eat an entire jar of peanut butter for lunch if I could. Same thing with almond milk, though I mainly would do that to make fun of Jude. He’s allergic to almonds, I guess it makes his throat all scratchy or something.”

As I was about to respond, a tall woman with red hair approached the table and tapped on Vincent’s arm. After registering the event, he nodded his head quickly so that his glasses fell down onto his nose.

“Come on, Vincent. We’ve got to get you back to class before the bell rings.”

“Mrs. C., if you just show me how to get back to the classroom, I can get there on my own in no time. I am somewhat of a visual learner if I do say so myself.”

Vincent began to laugh at his own remark before throwing the rest of his sandwich and the orange peel into his lunch bag. Tossing his Walkman into his backpack, he swung his legs over the bench and stood up, pulling the straps of his backpack over his shoulders. Like Jude, he reached his hand out towards me, and I shook it firmly.

“Nice talking to you, Lenny Perkins. Same time, same place tomorrow.”

“You’re a very weird kid, Vincent.” 

Mrs. C. seemed to be taken aback by my remark, but Vincent put his hand on his chest and silently mouthed the words _thank you_ before being walked off. 

As the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch, I flung my empty soda can back into my lunchbox. This would seem like a fairly ordinary event if not for what happened next, as this particular incident would dictate the rest of my relationship with the strange Vincent Bodenstein. Vincent, who laughed at his own jokes and ate more peanut butter in one afternoon than a family would consume in a whole month. I watched as the incident happened, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Not at his misfortune, but because of the truth that rang from it. Vincent had told me he wasn’t a philosopher, that he was just a weird kid that wanted to do things on his own. Still, as I walked by, the part of me that needed to clean Vincent’s glasses nagged at me once again. I stood, stared, and nodded before smiling and wandering off to my next class, never bending down to fix this for him.

As I sat at the table, waiting to be released back into the world, I watched as Mrs. C. walked Vincent out of the lunchroom. I watched as he tossed his brown paper lunch bag at the garbage can. And I watched as he missed it by at least a foot.


End file.
